The Wine Club for Cool (and Well-Balanced) Kids

By Jay McInerney

THE NEW RESTRAINT | Left to right: Jasmine Hirsch, Nathan Frailing and Fabien Castel at the In Pursuit of Balance tasting's after party in New York.

Daniel Silbert

SNOW WAS COMING down outside Charlie Bird, the wine-centric bistro in SoHo that’s become a tribal hub for New York City’s oenophiles. On this particular night, though, the place was crawling with winemakers from California.

Seated at a table beside the window, former New Yorker Jamie Kutch and his wife, Kristen Green, who now run Kutch Wines on the Sonoma Coast, complimented Rajat Parr, the influential San Francisco sommelier-turned-winemaker, on his pink cashmere sweater and offered him a glass of 1978 La Pousse d’Or Clos l’Audignac Volnay. Hirsch Vineyards’ Jasmine Hirsch, who had been wearing a torn and faded flannel shirt when I last saw her at her family vineyard, was dressed in a little black dress and kissing cheeks, including those of Ehren Jordan of Failla Wines in St. Helena, Calif. and Wells Guthrie of Copain Wines in Healdsburg, Calif.

The Californians, members of a group called In Pursuit of Balance (I.P.O.B.), founded in 2008 by Mr. Parr and Ms. Hirsch, were converging on New York to share with the city a new style of California wine. The following day, they would hold one of their buzzy, increasingly influential tastings at an event space in TriBeCa.

Ms. Hirsch and company are seeking to dismantle the stereotype of California wines as fruity, oaky and high in alcohol. The group was founded, in Ms. Hirsch’s words, “to support wineries who are striving to produce elegant, site-specific Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.” These are the signature grapes of Burgundy, and I.P.O.B. takes much of its inspiration from that region of France, which is dominated by independent growers who make some of the most sought-after wines on the planet.

These Californians are making wines for people who wouldn’t be caught dead drinking California wines, winning over tastemakers like the young Manhattan and Brooklyn sommeliers who would flock to their tasting the day after the snowstorm.

The impression that the cool kids had formed a wine club was reinforced when, around 1 a.m., the group at Charlie Bird moved on to Pearl & Ash, downtown New York’s other hip wine mecca, where they were greeted by managing partner and wine director Patrick Cappiello, wearing a black Misfits T-shirt. The winemakers downed multiple bottles of Savart, the cult grower Champagne of the moment. Sometimes, it seems, in pursuit of balance you have to get a little wobbly.

The idea for the group was cooked up in 2011 at RN74, the San Francisco restaurant where Mr. Parr, who was born in India and trained at the Culinary Institute of America, served as sommelier and mentor to a generation of young sommeliers. After several years at J.P. Morgan in New York, Ms. Hirsch had recently moved back to the West Coast to join the family business. Her father, David, owns one of the most celebrated vineyards on California’s Sonoma Coast, and was starting to produce his own wine. Ms. Hirsch had first met Mr. Parr when her father brought her as a young woman to New York for the celebration of the wines of Burgundy, known as La Paulée. She sought him out again when she moved West in 2008, and a romance developed. “Why don’t we have wines like this in California?” she asked him one night over a glass of Burgundy at RN74. “We do,” he said. He introduced her to some of the California Pinots that he believed shared a Burgundian aesthetic, like Littorai and Au Bon Climat. Mr. Parr had just started making wine in Santa Barbara county (his brands are called Sandhi and Domaine de la Côte), and the pair decided to stage a tasting of their favorite California Pinots as a learning experience for a small group.

“I wrote down a list of 10 or 12 I liked on the back of a cocktail napkin,” Mr. Parr told me as we shared a 1996 Dujac Gevrey Combottes at Charlie Bird. “The plan was to invite some friends, some somms, some people in the trade. It was packed. The next day there were lots of articles about the tasting and a lot of the discussion became heated. There was a feeling that I was creating division. I got hate mail.”

Boys and girls, please. How had a Pinot Noir tasting gotten so nasty? And how could the group that emerged with such a sensible sounding name generate such controversy? Balance seems like a fairly reasonable goal. And Mr. Parr is a courtly and gentle fellow. Part of the problem had to do with his long-standing advocacy, at RN74, of a certain style of wine: He refused to stock Pinots or Chardonnays that clocked in at more than 14% alcohol, a relatively low threshold in sunny California.

Many Golden State winemakers were outraged at his curating tactics, as were certain critics who championed big, ripe, powerful wines. “I think Raj is an unintentional lightning rod,” said Renée Bourassa, a sommelier who trained with him before moving to New York. Ms. Bourassa, who recently worked at the restaurant Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare, added, “He doesn’t criticize others but he has very particular taste.”

What Mr. Parr likes, in his own words, are “freshness, vibrancy, acidity and crunchiness.” (That last word, I think, is best understood as the opposite of “syrupy.”) What he doesn’t go for so much is what wine writer Jon Bonné, in his excellent new book “The New California Wine,” calls “Big Flavor” (i.e., super-ripe, jammy, alcoholic wines). Especially when it comes to Pinot Noir, which, in its Burgundian incarnation, tends to be more savory than sweet.

Mr. Parr insists there are no technical parameters, no strict cutoffs or exclusionary rules governing admission to I.P.O.B., which currently has 33 members. In fact, some of the members do make wines that clock in above 14% alcohol. The definition of balance is an ongoing project, Mr. Parr said. Each year a five-person committee blind tastes the wines of potential members and judges them. The wines that make the cut tend to be more restrained, less fruity, brighter and more acidic than the typical Cali Pinots and Chards. (Chardonnay was added to the program in 2012.)

Most member labels are too small to devote much money to marketing. They benefit from the exposure provided by semiannual tastings in California and New York, increasingly popular with industry professionals. Perhaps equally important is the growing cachet of being admitted to the I.P.O.B., whose members, in Mr. Parr’s words, “make wines that don’t tend to get huge scores in the Wine Spectator or the Wine Advocate.”

Personally, I think the group represents some of California’s most exciting Pinot Noir and Chardonnay producers. But I’m a Burgundy nut; if your palate skews toward ripe, intense fruit flavors, you may want to shop elsewhere.

California is no longer a punch line among New York’s wine cognoscenti, who generally reserve their praise for earthy Burgundies and high-acidity Mosel Rieslings.

The day after the Pearl & Ash festivities, some of the city’s top somms, including Raj Vaidya of Daniel and Paul Grieco of Hearth Restaurant, were rubbing elbows at the group’s tasting in TriBeCa. Tasters were trading notes, arguing favorites. Drew Family Cellars and Ceritas were getting lots of buzz, as was Steve Matthiasson’s 2012 Linda Vista Vineyard Chardonnay. Many more people attended the raucous afterparty that followed the tasting, at Lafayette in NoHo. Aldo Sohm of Le Bernardin, who won the Best Sommelier in the World title in 2008, hugged Ms. Hirsch with one arm while holding out a glass to John Beaver Truax of Chambers Street Wines, who filled it with a rare ’99 Fourrier Bourgogne Blanc. Winemaker Steve Matthiasson drank multiple glasses of 1969 Dr. Deinhard Deidesheimer Riesling. Wells Guthrie, of Copain Wines, was drinking a beer from Brooklyn Brewery.

The party was still going strong when I lolloped out sometime after one, and the I.P.O.B. crowd partied on, apparently attempting to prove that excess in the pursuit of balance is no vice.